The Court of Cassazione, with the sentence of 9 April 2021, n. 9475, stated that the lease contract concluded verbally and not registered, with one exception, is affected by relative nullity, protection, which can only be asserted by the tenant and is not detectable ex officio by the judge. Furthermore, he specified that art. 13, paragraph 6, of the law n. 431 of 1998, as replaced by art. 1, paragraph 59, of law no. 208 of 2015, also applies to contracts signed on a date prior to January 1, 2016. This rule, in particular, gives the tenant the right to request that the lease "be brought back to conditions compliant with the provisions of art. 2, paragraph 1 or by art. 2, paragraph 3 ".
Well, the ruling in question established that in the first place, art. 13, paragraph 6, of Law 431 of 1998 is applicable to all lease contracts stipulated after 30 December 1998, and not only to those stipulated from 1 January 2016, and that the signing of the contract in verbal form and the related failure registration is to be considered the cause of (only) relative nullity of the contract, as such therefore can be activated unilaterally by the tenant, not also by the lessor, nor detectable ex officio by the judge.
For this interpretation, however, it is necessary that the tenant determines himself in the sense of activating the right to recondition the contract attributed to him by the current art. 13, paragraph 6, of the law n. 431 of 1998; vice versa, the contract stipulated in oral form, however, must be considered affected by an absolute nullity, detectable ex officio.
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